The Shipbuilder

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Mitchell is a master at fully exploiting the lode of his material.
Following his Actors Association award in 1985, he has spent a couple of
years touring his one-person play about Norman Bethune, Gone the Burning
Sun, written in 1980 when Mitchell was in China and premiered at the
Guelph Spring Festival in 1984. After reportedly “wowing” audiences
from Australia to Whitehorse, Mitchell is currently doing a school
CanLit circuit closer to home.

The life of an eccentric Finnish immigrant, Tom Sukanen, has proved to
be similarly rich ink for his pen. The tale of a man on the prairies,
obsessed with building a steamship and dragging it across the plains
toward a river that would lead him to Hudson Bay and back to his
homeland, cannot help but capture the imagination. The reconstruction of
this legendary boat is a wonder that can be seen just outside of Moose
Jaw, and the history of the building of that ship is found in
Mitchell’s six-minute color documentary for the National Film Board.
Mitchell’s fictionalized account, The Shipbuilder, has a long record
of productions by professional and community theatres and adaptations by
the national radio networks of at least four different countries. The
script is reportedly in development as a motion picture at this time.
The first dramatic version of the text was written between 1976 and 1978
and published in 1979. A definitive playing text has, however, been
somewhat difficult to pin down because of successive revisions and radio
adaptations through the 1980s. Although a “Compuscript” has been
latterly available from the Playwrights Union of Canada, this trade
edition from Fifth House is a welcome response to the pressure for an
established text. The work emerges here as a two-act play with multiple
scenes in which the progressive construction and transportation of the
ship on-stage is to be accompanied by music from a percussionist
(Mitchell notes that the percussive and poetic elements of the present
script took shape from the radio adaptations).

In spite of the significant production challenges of The Shipbuilder,
it has already proved its worthiness as a Canadian classic. Pitting
obsession against madness, man against natural elements, and the
individual against social pressure, Mitchell has found an ideal subject
around which to hone his skills as a dramatist. The Shipbuilder lends
itself to imaginative direction and design (at least one production
split the voices of female characters into those of three Nordic
goddesses). It is also interesting to note that the play was staged in
1991 in Finland, the homeland so obsessively sought by the leading
character.

The trade publication of this text is long overdue.